Contents

News

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months
July-September 2011.

The 2011 ACP Executive Committee comprises the following people, in
alphabetical order (officers identified):

Yves Deville

John Hooker

Jimmy H.M. Lee - Secretary

Barry O'Sullivan - President

Thomas Schiex - Treasurer

Helmut Simonis

Peter Stuckey

Roland Yap

The ACP Executive Committee welcomes feedback and suggestions from
the ACP community. We encourage you to engage with the ACP-EC to
help design new initiatives that promote constraint programming.

ACP.1. Comment on CP 2011

On behalf of the ACP, the Executive Committee would like to congratulate
the various people responsible for making CP 2011 in Perugia such a wonderful
success. A very special thanks goes to Stefano Bistarelli (Conference Chair),
Jimmy Lee (Program Chair), Helmut Simonis (Applications Track Chair and Official
Photographer), Christian Schulte (Workshop and Tutorial Chair), Chris Jefferson
and Guido Tack (Doctoral Program Chairs), and Ian Miguel (Sponsorship Chair).
Stefano was supported by an excellent local organisation team (the Red Team)
who are all listed on the conference web-site:

The 2011 ACP Research Excellence Award was made at CP 2011. The award
committee was chaired by the ACP President (Barry O'Sullivan). The
members were Rina Dechter, Jimmy Lee, Alan Mackworth, and Pascal Van Hentenryck.
The committee recommended that this year's award go to Professor Patrick
Prosser. Pat's citation reads as follows: "awarded in recognition of a
programme of seminal and outstanding scientific contributions to both the
theory and practice of constraint programming." Pat was nominated by Ian Gent,
Barbara Smith and Toby Walsh. Pat gave his acceptance talk through the use of
a video, which he and Ian Gent made, followed by a Q&A. This is available for
viewing from YouTube (search for Patrick Prosser).

CP.3. ACP Doctoral Research Award 2010

This year's committee responsible for selecting the winning candidate for this
award was chaired by Roland Yap. The members of the committee were Peter van
Beek and Toby Walsh. The recipient of the award was Standa Zivny for his
doctoral dissertation entitled "The Complexity and Expressive Power of Valued
Constraints". Guido was nominated by Peter Jeavons (Oxford). On behalf of the
ACP, the Executive Committee would like to once again congratulate Standa on
his achievement.

Michele Lombardi, nominated by Michela Milano, received an honourable mention
for his dissertation entitled "Hybrid Methods for Resource Allocation and
Scheduling Problems in Deterministic and Stochastic Environments."

ACP.4. ACP General Assembly 2011

During the CP 2011 conference, the annual ACP General Assembly took place.
It was chaired by the current ACP President, Barry O'Sullivan, and was
well attended by the community. The reports and minutes of the assembly will
be made available from the ACP web-site.

ACP.5. CP 2012 Conference

The CP 2012 conference will be held in Quebec City, Canada. The Conference
Chairs for the conference will be Gilles Pesant and Claude-Guy Quimper, with
an additional Local Chair in Louis Martin Rouseau.

ACP.6. CP 2012 Program Chair

The ACP is delighted to announce that the CP 2012 Program Chair will be
Michela Milano (Bologna).

ACP.7. Expressions of Interest in Hosting CP 2013 and CP 2014

The ACP likes to plan CP conferences two years in advance. We are therefore
interested in hearing expressions of interest from those who are considering
hosting the conference in 2013 and 2014. A formal call for proposals will be
issued early in the new year. In the meantime please consider discussing
organising the conference with the ACP Secretary at
secretary@a4cp.org.

ACP.8. Call for Proposals to Host the ACP Summer School 2012

Members of the CP community who are interested in organizing the 2012
ACP Summer School should send a proposal to
secretary@a4cp.org by
November 30th 2011, containing at least the following information:

topic of the school

location

dates

organizers

provisional budget

Since its establishment, the summer school has been a major success with
feedback from student attendees being very positive.

NSF Fellowship in Computational Sustainability

The Institute for Computational Sustainability (ICS) is interested in
serving as the host institution for NSF Science, Engineering and
Education for Sustainability (SEES) Fellows applicants in the area of
computational sustainability. Candidates interested in potential
collaboration with ICS are encouraged to submit initial proposals of
interest to ICS.

In accordance with its mission and interdisciplinary focus, ICS seeks
candidates (per NSF requirement, U.S. citizens or nationals, or
permanent U.S. residents) with a strong computational and analytical
background and interest in environmental, economic, societal, or
energy related computational sustainability topics.

Interested candidates should submit to
comp_sust@cs.cornell.edu
a CV withrefereed publications list, a cover letter and a 2-page research
proposal highlighting the research interests of the candidate, the
relevance of proposed research to the field of computational
sustainability and beyond, the potential collaborations with ICS
researchers, and the specific research areas and directions of
interest no later than November 11, 2011. Please submit materials with
"SEES Fellow Application-[last name]" in the subject line.

Call For Participation

November 14-17, 2011, University of Ulm, Germany
In collaboration with the German University in Cairo

After the success of the spring course in Venice and two summer schools
on Constraint Programming and Constraint Handling Rules in Leuven and
Cairo (fully booked with 50 participants), we offer a free winter
school this time.

Constraint Programming (CP) makes it possible to model and specify
problems with uncertain, incomplete information and to solve
combinatorial problems, as they are abundant in industry and commerce,
such as scheduling, planning, transportation, resource allocation,
layout, design, and analysis.

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is both a versatile theoretical
formalism based on logic and an efficient practical high-level
programming language based on declarative rules and constraints. Well-
understood analysis techniques are available for the language. CHR
applications will be presented as well.

This Master level course is planned for 25 lecture and lab hours. The
course is also open for Bachelor and PhD students. Basic knowledge of
logic and Prolog will be helpful. Certificate of participation and
grading is possible on request.

The course is based on the books "Essentials of Constraint
Programming", Abdennadher and Fruehwirth, Springer, and
"Constraint Handling Rules", Fruehwirth, Cambridge University Press.

How to Participate - Apply Now!

The course is offered free of charge. Please email your application with
your academic details and interests to Thom.Fruehwirth at uni-ulm.de.
Places are limited and will be offered on a first-come first-served
basis. Application deadline is October 30, 2011. Accomodation is on
your own. Ulm can be reached by train from several nearby
international airports. Once accepted, students will receive
information about the location and time of the course, public
transport and accommodation hints. For details, follow the link above.

[ICAPS] Survey on the software of the Seventh IPC

After the IPC, I am still maintaining the software developed at
the Seventh International Planning Competition. New services have
been implemented and the documentation has been extended (a new
announcement is on the way indeed). While it just seems to me that there
is some potential on the new software I am very interested in your view.

It is only 10 questions and it would be definitely great if you could
take just 5 minutes to fulfill it, especially if you submitted an entry
to the last IPC or if you do usually evaluate automated planners.

In any case, please feel free to contact
me
directly to make more comments or any sort of clarifications.

[ICAPS] Call for Nominations: "ICAPS Best Dissertation Award"

This award honors an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in any area of
automated planning and scheduling. It will be given during the ICAPS
conference.

PhD dissertations that were completed and filed in 2010 or 2011 will be
considered for the ICAPS-12 Best Dissertation Award. The recipient will
receive a certificate and 500 USD.

The award committee is requesting nominations of candidate PhDs.

The nomination material should include the following:

a CV of the candidate with a complete list of publications,

a copy of the dissertation,

a nomination letter by the PhD advisor (this letter must specify
the completion/filing date of the dissertation)

two additional recommendation letters or a copy of the
request for such letters. If a request is submitted in lieu of
the actual recommendation letter, the letter itself must be
received by 15 February 2012.

Nominations should be submitted in electronic form (preferably as a
single PDF file or the URL of such a file) to the ICAPS Award Committee
chair: mark.boddy@adventiumlabs.org

A word of caution: it is possible to postpone asking recommenders for
their letters until the very last minute (31 January), leaving them only
two weeks to get the letters in to the committee. This seems to us to be
a high-risk strategy. We urge nominators to request these letters as
soon as possible, since the recommenders may need to familiarize
themselves with the contents of the thesis. Nominators are responsible
for ensuring that the letters of recommendation are submitted by the
final deadline. The committee will not solicit missing letters, nor will
it review incomplete nomination packets.

The dissertation should preferably be written in English. However, we
accept dissertations not written in English if they are submitted
together with the following documents that must be written in English: an
extended abstract of the dissertation, a series of papers that cover the
key results of the dissertation and a document that describes the mapping
from the papers to the chapters of the dissertation. Students who did not
win an award last year can be nominated again if they are still eligible
this year.

[ICAPS] Call for Nominations: "ICAPS Influential Paper Award"

This award honors the authors of a significant and influential paper in
any area of automated planning and scheduling. It will be given during
the ICAPS conference.

Papers that qualify for the award are those published in one of the ICAPS
family of conferences (ICAPS, ECP, EWSP, AIPS) at least 10 years before
the year of the current conference (i.e, up to 2002 for this year's
award).

The recipients of the 2012 award will receive a certificate, 500 USD and
one complimentary registration to the ICAPS-2012 conference.

The award committee is requesting nominations of candidate papers.

The nomination material should include:

the reference of the nominated paper,

the reasons in favor of the nomination,

either a URL from which the paper can be retrieved or a copy of
the paper itself. Please contact the committee if this last
requirement causes any difficulties.

Career news

Postdoctoral position at NICTA

National ICT Australia (NICTA) is Australia's ICT Research Centre
of Excellence. NICTA has laboratories in Brisbane, Canberra,
Melbourne and Sydney and works in close partnership with Australia's
best universities.

In Short

NICTA's Optimisation Research Group (40+ researchers) has multiple
postdoctoral research positions available.

Prerequisites

We are looking for motivated individuals with a PhD and a strong
track record in the the fields of Artificial Intelligence and
Operations Research. Areas of interest include:

constraint programming

mixed integer programming and mixed integer nonlinear programming

search, including local search

stochastic optimisation

multi-objective optimisation

simulation

planning and scheduling

vehicle routing

forecasting

game theory and mechanism design

Remuneration: AUD 80K-100K (= USD 85K-105K = EUR 60K-75K)
Duration: up to 3 years in the first instance

Senior Research Fellow / Research Fellow / Research Positions (Optimisation
and Automated Planning) at the University of Melbourne

3 Positions

Senior Research Fellow / Research Fellow in Optimisation

Research Fellow in automated planning

Research Software Engineer

In Short

The University of Melbourne is seeking outstanding Research Fellows and a
Research Software Engineer to conduct leading edge research in optimisation
and automated planning for mine scheduling.

The positions will be located in the Department of Computer Science and
Software Engineering within the Melbourne School of Engineering.

Salary:

$98,387-$113,446 AUD p.a. (Senior Research Fellow)

$80,318-$95,375 (Research Fellow)

$56,226-$76,299 (Research Software Engineer)

plus 9% superannuation;
Employment type: Full-time Fixed Term

About the Project

The successful candidates will conduct leading-edge research and
development in the area of optimisation and automated planning technology
for mine scheduling. The work is part of an Australian Research Council
(ARC) funded project, "Making the Pilbara Blend: Agile Mine Scheduling
through Contingent Planning". It will be conducted as part of a research
team of 7-8 Researchers.

The overarching responsibility of these positions will be the development
of constraint solving techniques, which integrate with contingent planning
techniques, for synthesising contingent plans for short term production
scheduling of iron ore in multi-mine pit settings.

This project tackles a challenging problem faced in mine scheduling. An
increased need for consistent quality has occurred at the same time as the
complexity of modern day mining operations has increased, across multiple
mine sites with variable ore grades and increasing infrastructure
constraints. There is a pressing need for more agile mining techniques that
maximise net present value (NPV) while accommodating the complexities and
uncertainties inherent in modern day mining operations.

The goal of this project is to bring together automated planning techniques
with constraint programming to address this paradigm shift, tackling some of
the most important fundamental research challenges in scheduling. The
project will develop agile scheduling techniques of great economic
importance. Carefully planned scheduling has the potential to reduce the
need for new infrastructure, minimising environmental impacts and maximising
regeneration after mining.

Contact

Summer Internship Position at IBM Watson Research Center

A summer internship position is available for 2012 in the "AI for
Optimization" group at IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New
York. The internship will last for about 3 months and will be scheduled
between March and October, 2012.

Prerequisites

Candidates should be exceptional Masters or PhD students in Computer
Science and related areas, and not have already received their PhD by
the internship start date.

The successful candidate is expected to have strong interest and some
experience in one or more of the following:

Developing novel technologies based on AI and OR to advance the
state of the art in combinatorial optimization (e.g., Heuristic Search,
Mixed Integer Programming (MIP), Linear Programming (LP))

Faculty Position in Programming Systems at Universite catholique de Louvain

About the Position

Université catholique de Louvain invites applications for a
full-time faculty position in Programming Systems within the Institute
of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied
Mathematics (ICTEAM). This position is to be filled by September 2012.

The successful candidate will carry out research in the field of
programming systems, including but not limited to programming languages,
adaptive software, artificial intelligence, algorithmics, software
analysis and synthesis. Still, other areas of competence will also be
considered, since qualifications take precedence over specialization.

Responsibilities include research, supervision of undergraduate and
graduate students, as well as PhD theses, submission and management of
research grants, and undergraduate/graduate teaching within the curricula
in Computer Science (
http://www.uclouvain.be/en-info.html ). Courses are taught in French
and English.

ICTEAM currently hosts more than 40 professors and more than 200
researchers. These researchers carry out both basic and applied research
in key fields of information and communication technologies, electronics,
computer science and applied mathematics. The University is located in
the new city of Louvain-la-Neuve, 25 kms southeast of Brussels, the
capital of Belgium, in the heart of Europe.